A broad range of therapies exist that may be used to treat patients afflicted with diseases, such as infections, cardiovascular disease, and neoplastic disease. Use of those therapies has revealed substantial differences in therapeutic response among individual. Any given drug may be therapeutic in some individuals while being ineffective in others. Further, a drug may produce adverse effects in certain individuals whereas others do not experience the same adverse reaction to the drug. Recognition of differences in drug response among individual is an important step towards optimizing therapy.
A problem with current approaches in drug therapy is that those therapies are designed for treatment of large patient populations as groups, irrespective of the potential for individual based differences in drug response. This approach is utilized due to costs and time associated with producing numerous cultures of an individual's cells, which is required for screening many different drugs as potential agents for effective disease treatment for a particular individual. This problem is particularly acute in the field of cancer therapy, in which tumors have qualities specific to individuals and individuals respond very differently to the same chemotherapeutic agent.
There is a need for methods that can rapidly and cost effectively culture and analyze an individual's cells so that personalized treatment protocols may be developed and implemented.